OK, I’m the chump. I’m waiting here at Wal-Mart with these 20 other people and they’re getting a bit surly. They just told us that they’re out of that electronic gadget we’re all waiting for. They said the company couldn’t make enough of them. It’s the one I worked on. My kid, Jennifer, is going to be really disappointed. That was going to be her big gift under the Christmas tree!
It’s my fault, but I’m not going to tell these people that. Well, it was partly my fault. Sure, I helped design the chip, but we’ve never worried too much about boundary scan before. We just do the JTAG insertion and everything’s usually OK. Never occurred to me that we should make sure the boundary scan actually worked. What’s boundary scan for anyway? Didn’t know back then I sure know now. They said they couldn’t test the printed circuit board without boundary scan. I mean, we just forgot about the boundary-scan compliance enable pin! That’s all. And then when prototypes were produced we found out they didn’t work and we couldn’t test them because the boundary scan whatchamacallit didn’t work. Talk about surprised! First we were going to re-spin the chip, but that would have taken too long. The PCB guys had to work around our mess, but by the time they figured it out, the product was late. Eight weeks late, to be exact, and we couldn’t produce enough to fill our orders. Bummer! And now they can’t sell ‘em because they don’t have ‘em.
People aren’t happy. I’m not happy. And I’m not sure what I’m going to say to Jennifer? How about a teddy bear!
